This (two) weeks in Drupal Core

What's new with Drupal 8?

Last week, in lieu of a This week in Drupal Core, xjm and wechick compiled a phenomenal This YEAR in Drupal Core, so here's a catch up of the last two weeks.

Happy 13th birthday, Drupal!

Drupal 1.0.0 was released on January 15th, 2001. Many software projects from that era are long forgotten by now. That we have stayed relevant and gotten stronger through 13 years of fast and chaotic evolution of the internet is, in my opinion, very impressive. Here's some highlights from the birthday:

For those of you like me who can't resist anthropomorphizing, Josh Koenig shared his take on Drupal growing up and will dive deeper into that and other insights in his keynote session at SANDCamp this Saturday.

Drupal 8 Alpha 8

For module developers who've already begun porting their modules to Drupal 8, there's a shiny new alpha8 for you to play with as of yesterday. These alphas are provided to give you something more stable to work off of than having to chase HEAD every day. If you do choose to chase HEAD though, be prepared for more volatility. For example, Move definition of menu links to hook_menu_link_defaults(), decouple key name from path, and make 'parent' explicit was a very important patch committed immediately following the alpha8 release, but requires extensive follow up changes that we are trying to resolve between now and the next alpha.

Where can I help?

Top criticals to hit this week

Each week, we check with core maintainers and contributors for the "extra critical" criticals that are blocking other work. These issues are often tough problems with a long history. If you're familiar with the problem space of one of these issues and have the time to dig in, help drive it forward by reviewing, improving, and testing its patch, and by making sure the issue's summary is up to date and any API changes are documented.

As always, if you're new to contributing to core, check out Core contribution mentoring hours. Twice per week, you can log into IRC and helpful Drupal core mentors will get you set up with answers to any of your questions, plus provide some useful issues to work on.

Notable Commits

The best of git log --after=2014-01-09 --pretty=oneline (and before alpha8) (65 commits in total):

#2144919 by yched, fago, effulgentsia, amateescu, tstoeckler, chx, larowlan, swentel: Allow widgets and formatters for base fields to be configured in Field UI.

Diving In With Sculpin by Ashley Cyborski. This one isn't about Drupal 8 directly, but one of the goals of switching Drupal 8's templating language to Twig was to make it more accessible to designers, and in this post, a designer with no prior templating experience shares her success story about picking up Twig.

Drupal 8 in "Real Life"

Also, although DrupalCon Prague is well behind us, if you're feeling nostalgiac or if you weren't there but want to know what the vibe was like, you can watch the Drupalcon Face to Face video posted by John Desalvo.

Whew! That's a wrap!

Do you follow Drupal Planet with devotion, or keep a close eye on the Drupal event calendar, or git pull origin 8.x every morning without fail before your coffee? We're looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. You could either take a few hours once every six weeks or so to put together a whole post, or help with one section more regularly. Contact xjm if you'd like to help communicate all the interesting happenings in Drupal 8!